Ahead of the coming legislative battle about whether to allow more charter schools in New York, critics and supporters traded angry charges yesterday at a testy public hearing.

While lawmakers like state Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem), who chaired the daylong session, likened corruption at charter schools to that of Wall Street firms, backers said the schools are accountable on those few occasions when wrongdoing is uncovered.

Supporters said highlighting the occasional problem at a charter school was simply an effort to wipe them all out.

“When there’s malfeasance, [charter-school] authorizers should be taking action against it,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.

“But, like all things, transparency and accountability and the call for it really can be used as an excuse to kill an industry — which is clearly what some of the participants here are interested in doing.”

Only last week, for example, the city pulled the plug on East New York Preparatory charter school in Brooklyn in response to a host of violations of its contract, supporters noted.

Perkins, a leading opponent of charters, said he would hold a second hearing on charter-school oversight next month.

He began yesterday’s hearing by calling the schools a “money-making scheme” similar to Enron and Goldman Sachs.

The senator questioned why charter schools are partnering with for-profit service providers and railed against apparent conflicts of interest among charter-school board members that he said wouldn’t be tolerated at traditional public schools.

“As in the financial industry, there are serious questions about a lack of transparency in the charter industry,” said Perkins — whose call for greater accountability was echoed by both the state and city teachers unions.

Even charter school supporters like state Sen. Craig Johnson (D-LI) said they welcomed measures that would increase oversight of the publicly funded, privately run schools.

But supporters said their opponents derailed the state’s bid to raise the charter-school cap above 200 in January by linking it to more difficult rules for opening future schools. That contributed to New York’s failure to win as much as $700 million in federal education aid through the Race to the Top program, Johnson said.

Johnson also highlighted the hypocrisy of the United Federation of Teachers for complaining that charter schools aren’t transparent enough when its own union-run charter school in Brooklyn has been hit with the same criticism.

“When we talk about transparency and accountability, I think it should apply to everybody,” he said.

A recent SUNY report said of the UFT charter school, “The large school board’s lack of formality has at times resulted in violations of the New York open meetings law.”

There was “a meeting with no quorum with action taken, votes taken by written submission [and] executive session not being entered into properly,” it said.

Johnson’s dig at the union came several hours after UFT President Michael Mulgrew called him out for having accepted $65,000 in donations from charter interests.